Sadly, there are dozens of internet sites that will either sell you this "do nothing' machine for a few hundred bucks up to a few thousand or they advertise treatment at a Rife Clinic near you, for whatever ails you, from cancer to dandruff, no malady is too much for a miracle Rife Light Machine. I said this was sad because in so many cases the people buying this quack device really are sick.

Who was Raymond Royal Rife and what exactly did he invent? Well, for starters, we know Rife was no doctor as he told many of his followers. Despite his claims of attending Johns Hopkins and the University of Heidelberg, no student records were every found and they keep really good records. Not one person has ever remembered him as a classmate because he was never there! Rather, Rife's education was limited to that of a machinist as an optical instrument maker (optician) and a part-time chauffeur. He was a pretty clever machinist, we have to give him credit where credit is due!

Next, his bogus theory for the cause of cancer and it's cure was NEVER proven in any sort of medically supervised, double blind, study and it was rejected at various times by the best medical science as sheer quackery. However, Rife was a clever conman (as many are) and he had an aptitude for mechanics, which was later displayed in his "wonder machine" that almost made him rich thanks to his own self-promoting. He almost pulled it off. Time and again he used his gift for promotion to overwhelm his less entertaining, but highly educated and skilled medical critics.

Rife was brought to prominence back in the 1930's, during the depression era, when he was working as a chauffeur for Timken family of the Timken Roller Bearing fortune. He devised a scam that involved faking his education and using the discredited work of another to obtains thousands of dollars from Mrs. Timken. Allegedly, all the money went into the construction of a special microscope with the ability to focus on heretofore invisible bacterium! Rife claimed "he could see bacterium change over the course of their life. He believed that bacterium goes through 4 phases before they become what he identified as a cancer bacterium."

After a 100 years of medical research on cancer cells nobody other than Rife ever saw this so-called bacterium, even to this day it looks like he just made that word up. No! He really made stuff up? Yes, he made wild medical claims up all the time. But, trying to prove a negative is impossible, it's like to prove there are no Space Bats. You can assert it based on a lack of evidence, but how do you prove it? What we can say with certainty is cancer is not "bacterium" bacteria. If it turns out at some point in the future that somehow a rare form of virus might be related to a cause of cancer, big deal. Even a stopped clock can be right twice a day, this proves nothing. "Well-known debunker Peter Bowditch points out that no single virus, even Rife's hypothesized 'BX' virus which "caused all cancers", can account for all forms of cancer. According to the current medical understanding, viruses are only responsible for approximately 15% of all cancers."

But, remember Rife was pushing "bacterium" and his vibrations using light were supposed to cure any disease, so stay focused on the hoax and I'll explain more.

Rife didn't come up with any evidence at any time to support his claims and not one person since his time decades ago has ever been able to see what he claimed he saw, but never mind the facts, we've got a good con to promote here and so people continue to be taken.

Rife claimed his first machine was mysteriously vandalized just before it could yield results, hmmm...how coincidental? Until that vandalism, it was on display, viewed by hundreds of people as Rife proclaimed it's wonders. It was considered by all that saw it as quite impressive, just, nobody except Rife ever actually saw it work and nobody ever would thank to that vandalism.

How it worked became another closely guarded secret and another red flag for spotting a con-game, although Rife openly "talked" about his theory and how it worked. Like they say, talk is cheap. The destruction of the machine should have been one more red flag, but this actually played out fairly well for Rife, because he often found himself dealing people who bought into the great medical conspiracy theory.

Rife's original (albeit naive) benefactor may have provided him with all the money he needed to complete his first grand deception, but, it was Rife's showmanship that won the day over the critics. And it was all done in a manner that would have made P.T. Barnum proud! Prior to his work being actually proven to work, Rife had convinced a fairly large number of investors to give him money to develop his science even further, part two of the big con.

His game went over almost too well, because the notoriety that followed brought a certain amount of unwanted attention on Rife and his unproven medical theories. This scientific oversight ultimately was Rife's undoing, and his pack of lies came tumbling down. Rife was indicted for fraud and convicted. Rife was a broken man and died an alcoholic.

Since Rife's fall from grace many imitators have emerged to champion his work and reap the financial rewards with their own version of a Rife machine....and the testimonials keep on mounting, adding new credibility to an old fraud.

Rife original work said cancer originated from bacteria and further, that all pathogens, including the cancer causing bacteria, emanated a certain frequency. By dialing in on this unique frequency and targeting the pathogen it could be immediately neutralized. Actually this idea was not even Rife's, it was first hypothesized by "Dr. Albert Abrams (1864-1924), an American physician who became a millionaire and was branded by the American Medical Association the dean of gadget quacks".

His research was refined by Royal Rife and a New Mexico chiropractor, James Bare. They drew up tables giving the..."frequency of 30,000 organisms they said caused every condition from dandruff to leprosy, strokes and syphilis. AIDS, for instance, is said to be cured by a frequency of 2,489 kilohertz in as little as three three-minute sessions."

Of course with all that we know today about the causes and cures for various cancers, Rife's medical ignorance was pathetic, but in the 1930's his claims were much more difficult to refute. But, despite this current knowledge, the Rife legacy lives on in con's seeking a quick buck from their willing dupes from around the world....thus fulfilling P.T. Barnum's most famous prophecy!

For more information on this article I suggest the following sites:

http://amr2you.blogspot.com/2005/07/will-that-rife-machine-2005-plus-model.html

http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/News/rife.html

http://www.healthwatcher.net/Quackerywatch/Cancer/Cancer-news/smh001230rife-aus.html

http://www.devicewatch.org/reports/aquadetox.shtml